Love, Providence, And The Mind-Expanding Genius Of 'Past Lives'
#229: "Past Lives," "Reality," "The Age Of Innocence," "Black Mirror"
Edition 229:
Hey movie lovers!
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This week: I give rave reviews to Past Lives, a not-so-romantic drama that get me thinking deeply. Then, the Sydney Sweeney-fronted Reality on Max, which impresses in just 75 minutes. Of course, we’ve got our streamers, and then in this week’s “Trailer Watch,” a horror comedy starring John Boyega and Jamie Foxx.
Past Lives
It’s quite easy, when you’re young and anxious, to tie yourself into knots thinking about the infinitely branching decision trees laid out before you. Moving here, taking a job there, bumping into this person at this time…any one tiny decision now can drastically change the course of your life.
In the context of that paralyzing enormity, it’s hard not to characterize any romantic connection as providence, or at least coincidence. Maybe that’s why we call the end point of romantic love “ending up” with someone.
Past Lives leans hard into this philosophy of providence through the Korean word “in-yun,” which references the idea of reincarnation to posit that two people meeting is a sign that they had some sort of relationship in a … “past life.” It’s a pretty naked attempt to make the movie seem more profound, and the amazing thing about writer/director Celine Song’s debut feature is that she actually earns that profundity in the end.
This is a what-if love triangle movie between protagonist Nora, her childhood crush in Korea, and her eventual white husband in the United States. It’s told in three distinct acts — age 12, in Korea; age 24, when Nora reconnects with her Korean love interest via Skype; and age 36, when the Korean comes to visit Nora and her husband in New York City.
This situation, or something very similar to it, apparently happened to Song in real life. Yet her film seems intent on bursting the fairytale bubble. In truth, this is not a particularly “romantic” movie. Nora, by her own admission, begins dating a guy based on proximity, moves in with him to save on rent and marries him for a green card. In a lesser movie, this would be presented as a failure. Yet this is her definition of love, and her view on life is similarly pragmatic. She’s happy knowing she tried her best.
One of the primary differences between an art house movie like this and a popcorn movie is the willingness to accept this ambiguity. None of these characters are good or bad. Nora is unfulfilled and perhaps too curious. Her husband is compassionate yet insecure. And the interloper is innocent yet naive. They are all nuanced and messy emotionally, and the movie highlights these jagged edges rather than sanding them down.
It can be quite difficult as the drama unfolds for a viewer to figure out where to place oneself, or who we should be rooting for — though no doubt this will be a movie that sparks a million “what would you have done in that situation” conversations after watching. That ambiguity only amplifies the feelings of confusion and sadness within a viewer, transferred to and from Nora, which is kind of the point of the entire movie.
The most obvious comp for this movie is Wong Kar-wai’s In The Mood For Love, but it’s interesting to contrast Past Lives with the magnificent The Worst Person In The World from last year. While that movie is fatalistic in its worldview, in its stylistic execution it is dream like, begging a viewer to believe in the magic of love even as it is continuously disproven.
This movie on the other hand is incredibly naturalistic. It’s not flashy. Camera moves are simple, the locations are normal looking, and the dialogue is a marvel of authenticity. If there is any signature line from the movie, it’s the extended silences that occur in the pregnant pauses between our characters, which somehow express more than words ever could.
Watching this movie in the theater (I’m worried the effect will be muted at home), this quietness causes one to lean in, breathless. Because the emotional stakes are so high, the final conversation was an intense for me as any action scene. It is the best ending of any movie so far this year.
As with many great works of art, my feelings and appreciation toward this movie have improved every day since I saw it last week, especially after I “solved it.” Or at least, I didn’t realize that the construction of the movie reinforces its themes, a trick that very few movies are able to pull off. Because I couldn’t put it together and don’t think it’s too much of a spoiler, I’ll share it with you now:
What if each of the three timelines — when our characters are at such distinct and different points in their lives that they’re basically different people — what if each of those timelines is its own “past life.” And the final conversation is the ultimate in-yun.
Woah. Mic drop. Head explosion.
Go see this movie immediately.
Something New
Reality (Max): The script for this movie is taken verbatim from the transcript between FBI interrogators and a woman (actually named Reality Winner) accused of leaking classified documents. It’s really more of a documentary recreation than an actual movie, and the production is stripped down to absolute barebones. The 100% authenticity of it is obvious in the construction of the movie, and makes it an infinitely interesting look into the inner workings of both the FBI and the intelligence community.
The only thing making it cinematic at all is the presence of Sydney Sweeney, one of our brightest rising movie stars playing against type here as the accused leaker. Much of the movie is long take close ups directly on her as she’s pelted with questions, and her ability to play complicated emotions while not being overly showy is both excellent and surprising, given her career of more broad and maximalist performances.
At just 75 minutes, this thing — whatever it is — needs to be seen.
Something Old
The Age of Innocence (1993): A podcast recommended this movie to accompany Past Lives as a “masterpiece” example of a rom-dram about love unrealized. I was really curious to see what Martin Scorcese’s take would be on a movie set in the stiff upper-lipped society of 19th century New York, but it turns out, rather than put his spin on it he pretty much just made a faithful adaptation of the classic chamber drama novel by Edith Wharton. It’s something you might expect from like a Merchant-Ivory movie but with the star power of Daniel Day-Lewis, Michelle Pfeiffer and Winona Ryder and close-to-perfection from a technical execution standpoint.
If you’re a fan of any of those Jane Austen adaptations, or movies like Gosford Park or Howard’s End, then you’re primed for the rhythms of a story in which most of what’s actually happening between our characters is never spoken or acted upon. I don’t think it holds a lot of crossover appeal for people who wouldn’t normally be into these kinds of movies, myself among them, but the quality is undeniable.
On another note, I can only imagine what Day-Lewis was like on set in his ultra method actor mindset playing a character as sexually repressed as our protagonist here. That must’ve been a ton of fun.
Something to Stream
Black Mirror (Netflix): This nightmarish near-future anthology show has entered the popular lexicon at this point, and the running question is always how it can continue to make compelling episodes when the real world has “gone full Black Mirror.”
The sixth season dropped on Thursday and I checked out the first episode, “Joan Is Awful,” which is about a woman who finds out that a streaming service (which looks and sounds exactly like Netflix) has a new show that seems to be dramatizing her exact life. Of course, things only get crazier from there. Can’t wait to watch the rest of these new episodes this weekend!
Trailer Watch: They Cloned Tyrone
It’s been interesting to see how in the wake of Get Out — not to say that Jordan Peele invented black cinema, FAR from it — there’s been little subgenre pop up of horror-comedies centering on the idea of white people messing with black people in extreme ways. This weekend there’s one of these movie scoming out in theaters called The Blackening.
This one has something that one doesn’t: John Boyega, Jamie Foxx, Teyonah Parris and Keifer Sutherland. The 80s disco music and quip-heavy dialogue play to Foxx and Parris’ strengths, and the movie looks really funny (even if I’m not sold on Boyega’s comedy!), but pulling off the balance of that tone with an allegory for reverse-replacement theory to achieve that “elevated horror” tag is really tricky.